Pitch of the Day: 'American History X' Meets 'The Believer'

It may not seem a stretch to combine two films about Neo-Nazi skinheads, but there is enough of a difference between American History Xand The Believerfor them to meet as today's pitch. And I wasn't sure of any other relative films that didn't ignore the Judaic aspect of this story. Maybe you've seen the article from the New York Timesover the weekend about the Polish man who went from being a Neo-Nazi to an Orthodox Jew. He even got circumcised at the age of 24.

This is the opposite of Ryan Gosling's character in The Believer. He begins a student of the Torah and transitions to self-hating anti-Semite. As for Ed Norton in American History X, he starts as a Neo-Nazi and becomes reformed after a stint in prison, but that character is not Jewish. Of course, we can throw in mention of other films involving racist skinheads, such as This Is England, but still the Times piece includes an interesting plot point I don't think we've seen before: the former truck-driving skinhead didn't know his true heritage.

According to the report, which more generally looks at the Jewish revival in Poland, this now 33-year-old man had been baptized and raised Catholic and joined an anti-Semitic group while a kid in 1980s Warsaw. At 18, he married another skinhead, who ultimately discovered both she and him had Jewish grandparents. His ancestry had been masked due to his grandmother escaping the Holocaust by living in a monastery. Eventually he decided to become ultra-Orthodox.

And that's about all the short article says. I'd love to know more about the man's story, though, so I hope that someone will buy the movie rights to his life. Anyone else think his positive change would make a good movie, or do you feel American History X already went there adequately? Personally, i don't think there's ever too many films that promote tolerance.